The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

The Trapped Former Villainess Wants to Escape from the Sadistic Prince (18+)

What's It About? 

Ordinary office worker Anna is suddenly reincarnated into an 18+ otome game--but as the villainess! Now in the role of Annelie, she's not interested in hot and steamy fun, she's desperate to escape. Except her husband, the handsome and secretly sadistic Prince Lienhard, isn't letting her go so easily. Instead, he's pressing her to reenact their wedding night to help her regain Annelie's memories! Will she be able to resist his touch or is she destined to bend to his every whim?

The Trapped Former Villainess Wants to Escape from the Sadistic Prince has a story by Usui Katsura and art by CARMILLA, with English translation by Christine Dashiell. This volume is lettered by Ochie Caraan. Published by Steamship (April 1, 2025). Rated Mature.

---

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris
Rating:

Due to the nature of the material they're riffing, otome-game-based villainess isekai tend to have more of a focus on character and circumstances than their male-led bog-standard RPG-Maker-ass siblings. So too does Sadistic Prince open, with leading lady Anna learning about the former villainess's body she's now piloting, trying to figure out how she wound up married to the titular prince, and navigating where the game's plot line currently sits. There's a sense of Going Through The Motions about it, same as in so many isekai, but if it must be paint-by-numbers, at least there is some paint and not just the numbers. There's a momentary sense of mystery as Anna learns how the player on the run she's occupying must have hit a Bad End in the game, sending her off the rails and into the leading lady role.

Mildly interesting as all that is to ponder, it ultimately doesn't matter all that much, since Sadistic Prince, as a Steamship title, is all about the reader getting to enjoy Anna getting her bodice ripped in different, exciting ways. Okay, "enjoy" is the intended reaction, but that's entirely presumed based on a specific target audience for this book. No doubt plenty of people aren't going to have a good time with Anna's repeated protests and expressions of fear at Lord Lienhard forcing himself on her (straight-up admitting he's raped her in their first time). So it's important to know about this stuff in advance. Whether that is a problem for a given reader is going to be down to their very personal predilections, and I know that there are plenty of people who will be happy to fill in Anna's fantasy of being a sub with so many spicy toppings.

With that in mind, I do wish Sadistic Prince more explored the mentalities and dynamics that go into these experiences of dangerous dom-times. It'd be nice to hear how Anna originally interfaced with Lienhard's route when she played the game since that could give more insight into her reactions to his actions. There also hasn't been a ton of development as far as Anna discovering herself and how much she's Into It yet, which I feel ought to be the driving character psychology in entertaining this fantasy. The only whiff of that which is written in is Lienhard expressing a serious virgin/whore complex when it comes to his preference for how Anna acts. If the bonus prose story at the end of the volume is any indication, the writing of Sadistic Prince isn't that interested in exploring the interiority of the characters, instead focusing on setting up the acts themselves. On top of that, the translation for this volume reads clunky in places, including a couple of instances of separated sentences reading in the wrong word bubble hierarchy. Like a misunderstood bad boy making my wilder fantasies come true, I wanted to give Sadistic Prince the benefit of the doubt. While it has some fun moments, a lot of other parts fall flat, and it's not living up to all of its exciting potential.

---

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

Whenever I'm given a story that promises to delve into the world of S&M, I always get a little bit scared because these stories always have a very weird way of portraying consent in a way that feels natural or healthy. I like the initial setup here, as it did lead to a believable gray area for developing these S&M situations. We have a character who wakes up in a hentai game, but she awakens after the game is over in the mind of a character married to a professional sadist. She's forced to play up the fact that she has amnesia, and her new husband thinks that if he physically reminds her about the relationship they used to have, then maybe she'll get her memories back. That's a solid start.

But then the series tries to speedrun through the relationship between these two, and it starts to lose me by the second half. The line between consent and communication gets blurred very uncomfortably. It's nice that our female lead starts to open up to the idea that she might be into some of the things that are being done to her, but that feels like it comes as more of a justification for the earlier parts of the book rather than any sense of satisfying character arc. I don't believe the blossoming relationship between these two because it's not predicated on anything meaningful..

The sexy scenes are admittedly very nice. I like the different lingerie that is shown, and there's less of an emphasis on actual sex. There's a lot of teasing, edging, and exposure play that is done, which I am all for. S&M stories need to understand that there is more to developing a scene than just going right into the sex. I like a lot of these in a vacuum, I just wish the story and emotional throughline that leads to them were a lot stronger. If you're going to pick this up, you'll probably get something out of the S&M scenes, but I don't feel like there's much else besides that, which feels unfortunate.